Ben Scofield: Cleanliness Is Next to Domain Specificity
Posted by Kevin Sun, 04 Nov 2007 19:58:00 GMT
I. Linguistics
- We are programming languages – they can certainly be compared to natural languages
- Regional dialects are crazy. Can I get a coke? Pop is delicious.
- Jargons and cants differ not in grammar but in vocabulary. Hmmm.
- Creoles and pigeons differ in both grammar and vocabulary from their parent languages
- Getting back to ruby, are domain specific languages (DSLs) really languages? Or are they dialects, or something else?
- DSLs are really just about changing the words we use
- Linguistic determinism is crap
- The eskimos do not have 33 billion words for snow. For one, “the eskimos” is not one group of people with one language. Additionally, there may be lots of snow-related words in any given native alaskan language; however, there are lots of snow-related words in English as well.
- Tests are testing something that is already there. Specifications come before something else – this leads you in the right – or at least the test first – direction
II. Refactoring
- He showed a bit of shit code to get flight information from kayak and refactored it into a class with a more readable API
- Use symbols instead of strings to avoid using quotes everywhere
- Avoid parens when that makes things more readable
- We will never model the domain exactly, so there is always room for improvement
Cool talk!
